Amazon to host launch event for 3D-enabled smartphone on June 18

Amazon on Wednesday issued invitations to a launch event scheduled to take place June 18 in Seattle, the company’s hometown. A promotional video for the event accompanied the invitation and while we aren’t shown exactly what’s on the docket, some of the remarks in the clip (as well as the image above) give us a pretty good indication of what to expect.

The 50-second teaser video shows a number of people reacting to a device that’s just out of view. As you’d expect, the people in the video are awestruck by what their seeing. Words and phrases like awesome, crazy and even super awesome are used multiple times.

More telling, however, are comments like, “it moved with me” and “pretty damn intuitive” mixed in with the side-to-side motions of the viewers. The latter, of course, hints at the long-rumored 3D capabilities of the handset.

For those not up to speed, the handset is rumored to employ as many as four front-facing cameras to track the position of a user’s head and arrange things on-screen to simulate a 3D effect. Some with knowledge of Amazon’s phone say the effect is similar to that of a hologram.

Elsewhere, most expect the Amazon phone to have decent but not mind-blowing specifications. A 4.7-inch display operating at 720p, a Qualcomm processor, 2GB of RAM and an industry-standard 13-megapixel camera are all expected.

Using slightly slower hardware may not be a bad thing as it would allow Amazon to keep the cost of the phone down and ultimately make it available to more buyers.

Amazon certainly has an opportunity to shake up a smartphone industry that hasn’t really seen any groundbreaking advances over the past few years. Whether or not the 3D technology becomes a game-changer, however, remains to be seen.